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Monday, May 12, 2014

Old Dog, New Tricks: Yet Another Cover for Rachel

We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcasts to bring you this update
on the state of Finding Rachel Davenport
– the paperback. It has a new cover:

She's new, she's purple, she's...naked?

It also has a new price: $6.99 (or £6.33 or €7.42). This is not a
limited-time offer or anything like that, it’s just that, when I uploaded the
new cover, I noticed the paperback was priced at $9.99 and that was a mistake—I
had always meant to price it lower. (This could explain the enthusiasm
customers displayed in avoiding buying the paperback—practically as soon as I
set it to $6.99, someone bought a copy.)

Pricing aside, this new cover is not to be confused with the cover for
the e-book…

Don't confuse the price, either: this is only £1.61 including VAT

…or the erstwhile cover for the paperback…

…or the fact that the e-book started life with a different cover altogether.

So, why the confusion and indecision over the cover, and why am I
seeking to make it even worse? I’m not; I’m trying to clear things up.

Finding Rachel Davenport began life as an e-book published
by Prospera Press’ Opis Imprint with what I thought was a dynamite cover:

The
readers, however, seemed to disagree, so the publishers, who seem to know what
they are doing, asked if I would consider changing the cover. I did. I like the
new cover and, although readers aren’t exactly snapping e-copies off of the
virtual shelves, the book is e-selling fairly consistently.

The publishers also allowed me to publish the paperback version myself,
which came in handy for sending hard-copies to reviewers, as well as friends and
family. (What, you didn’t get your free copy? It must have got lost in the
mail; the good news is, you can now buy a copy at the reduced price of $6.99.)

Anyway, producing the paperback copy was a snap, but the cover was a bit
out of my purview. So I spent a few hours with Photoshop and came up with this:

Not bad for someone who doesn't know what they are doing.

I considered this an adequate and (let’s face it) fairly lame cover, but one that would suffice as a stop-gap measure. Then I stumbled
across One on One – 101 True Encounters by
Craig Brown in the local book store:

Doesn't seem quite as lame now, does it?

This book was published by Fourth Estate
books, a reputable publisher (Annie Proulx, anyone?) that, I assume, has a
stable of professional cover artists at its disposal (or at least a
brother-in-law who took Commercial Illustration 101 at the local community
college), and the cover they came up with looked an awful lot like my lame
done-in-an-afternoon effort.

This, of course, meant I could pat myself on the back for a job well
done and go about my business, but eventually I realized I had to bring in a
pro. So I hired JD Designs and she came up with the new paperback cover, which
I think is a bit cheeky, over-the-top, flashy, and captures the tone of the
book pretty well.

(Quick aside: I thought the silhouette looked too much like a naked woman, so I asked the designer to add the cape. Now the silhouette looks like a naked woman wearing a cape. Still, it's a result.)

So to recap:

LT: The PAPERBACK, published by Lindenwald Press RT: The EBOOK, published by Prospera Publishing

This situation should hold
steady until my contract with Prospera runs out, at which point I put the new, purple cover on both editions. I will, of course,
write another post at that time, under the guise of keeping you up-to-date, but
which will really be a thinly disguised reminder that I have a book (several,
in fact) out there and ...

Hang on, someone’s at the door.

How is that for serendipity? The
postie just arrived with my shipment of Finding
Rachel Davenport sporting her spiffy, new cover. (No, I did not make that
up—the post came just as I was typing that paragraph.)

I've had your book in my Amazon shopping cart forever! and with tax refunds this year, I finally went ahead and ordered it. I got the purple cover and believe me when I say nudity never crossed my mind. Maybe because I was so excited to get it. Unfortunately I cannot leave a review just yet. I am a reading/book addict and I'm currently finishing up one more that I need to return to the library. But I'll definitely be starting yours before the weekend. Can't wait!!!

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